.Canada’s Vancouver has been suffering a mirror-image of Auckland’s runaway housing price boom. Like Auckland, average house prices were past the $900,000 mark. Canadians were being locked out of buying their own home by cashed-up foreign speculators.

Last month, the State government of British Columbia imposed a 15% sales tax on foreign house buyers (Chinese, Americans, etc) and the result has deterred foreign speculators.

Here in New Zealand, National is obsessed with it’s free-market doctrine and is willing to sacrifice our tradition of home-ownership. Foreign (and homegrown) speculators are inflating a housing bubble that is not only unfair to New Zealanders wanting to buy their own home, but is ultimately unsustainable.

Unless we literally want to become tenants in our own country, the sale of houses to non-New Zealanders must be banned immediatly. The free-market doctrine serves wealthy overseas investors, as well as local speculators, but not New Zealanders wanting their own homes.

I urge those who vote National to consider what sort of country they want to live in, and what sort of country they want to leave their children.

If National voters think that money is all that matters, then we truly will get the kind of society we deserve..-Frank Macskasy